Built in the twilight of the Tsarist state, Moscow's Metropole Hotel is a poignant reminder of the decadence of the last regime. But today its corridors are musty, its rooms are dank, and now its restaurant is the scene of a quadruple murder. To keep the killings under wraps, the Kremlin hands the investigationover to famously discreet police investigator Porfiry Rostnikov. A terrorist is targeting foreigners to embarrass the Soviet state, and the killer will happily sacrifice any Russian who gets in the way.

Englishman Harold Adrian Russell Philby, nicknamed Kim, slips onto the Russian freighter Domatova as it quietly sails out of the Beirut harbour. A spy for the Soviet Union, he flees the Lebanese capital with just the clothes on his back and uncertainty over his fate in Moscow. Will he be welcomed as a senior Soviet intelligence officer? Will the Great Game he's so keen on playing have a third act? Or will the Heart of Darkness have a more sinister purpose? Impossible to put down, Young Philby paints a vivid picture about one of recent history's most fascinating and subtle spies.

Drawing from reams of historical data, laboratory experiments, field research, and eyewitness accounts, this comprehensive guide is the only book you'll need to face the greatest challenge mankind has ever encountered. Ignorance is the Undead's strongest ally, knowledge their deadliest enemy. Personal choice, the will to live, must be paramount when the dead begin to rise. The choice is up to you.

It began with rumours from China about another pandemic. Then the cases started to multiply and what had looked like the stirrings of a criminal underclass, even the beginnings of a revolution, soon revealed itself to be much, much worse. Faced with a future of mindless, man-eating horror, humanity was forced to accept the logic of world government and face events that tested our sanity and our sense of reality.

In the year 2017 in Russia poets and writers are obsolete, class distinctions are painfully sharp, and spirits intervene in the lives of humans from their home high in the mythical Riphean Mountains. Professor Anfilogov, a wealthy and emotionless man, sets out an expedition to unearth priceless rubies that no one else has been able to locate. Young Krylov, a talented gem cutter whom Anfilogov had taken under his wing, is seeing off his mentor at the train station when he is drawn to a mysterious stranger who calls herself Tanya. A scandalous affair ensues, but trouble arises in the shape of Krylov's ex-wife Tamara and a spy who appears at the lovers' every rendezvous. As events unfold, Krylov begins to learn more than he bargained for about the women in his life and realises why he recognises the spy from somewhere deep within his past. Meanwhile, Anfilogov's expedition reveals ugly truths about man's disregard for nature and the disasters stemming from insatiable greed.

Many already see Daniel Stein, Interpreter, which won the Russian National Literary Prize, as the Great Russian novel of our time. Indeed, Ludmila Ulitskaya has earned accolades abroad for this groundbreaking work, now available in English. The novel tells the story of Daniel Stein, a Polish Jew who miraculously survives the Holocaust by working for the Gestapo as an interpreter. This charade allows him not only to save himself, but to help hundreds of others by sharing vital information with those in peril. After the war, he converts to Catholicism, and emigrates to Israel where he creates a Christian community. Daniel's willingness to communicate with all cultures stands as a symbol of love, humanity and tolerance. The author beautifully renders the life, of a modern saint, who inevitably ends his life as a martyr, the victim of his own will to help others at all costs. Though seemingly impossible, the life and destiny of Daniel Stein are not an invention — the character is based on the life of Oswald Rufeisen, the real Brother Daniel, a Carmelite Monk who lived at Stella Maris monastery on Mount Carmel in Haifa and who died in Israel in 1998.

The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years. Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War. Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, “By excluding the human factor, aren't we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn't the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as the living dead”?

When Julia Child arrived in Paris in 1948, a 'six-foot-two-inch, thirty-six-year-old, rather loud and unserious Californian, she spoke barely a few words of French and didn't know the first thing about cooking. 'What's a shallot?' she asked her husband Paul, as they waited for their sole meuniere during their very first lunch in France, which she was to describe later as 'the most exciting meal of my life'. As she fell in love with French culture, buying food at local markets, sampling the local bistros and taking classes at the Cordon Bleu, her life began to change forever, and My Life in France follows her extraordinary transformation from kitchen ingenue to internationally renowned (and loved) expert in French cuisine. Bursting with adventurous and humorous spirit, Julia Child captures post-war Paris with wonderful vividness and charm.